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that said my sister in law is currently working from home and her actual job seems pretty nice. she has the occasional video call but mostly spends her day cooking and drinking tea while doing some spreadsheets. it only sucks when she has to actually come into the office and look busy
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Feb 9, 2022 03:22
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zmcnulty posted:Realistically the vast majority of jobs that (white) foreigners do and the kinds of companies we work for means we can generally avoid all of the poor work/life balance that a lot of Japanese people endure, if desired. Even the shittiest English teacher dispatch companies may treat their gaijins like dirt and pay them like 3 million yen a year, yet they're also not requiring them to stay in the office until 9PM every night. Sure there are some exceptions--starting your own business, law, some roles in finance, IT crunch--but those jobs often have poor work/life balance outside of Japan too. It's mostly the "black" SMOs in Japan that have the semi-mandatory ridiculous work hours you hear about, and those usually aren't the kinds of companies that would hire any Westerners at all. For big companies, the ones sponsoring visas and all that, there's way too much reputational risk. Imagine the fallout if an American guy working at, I dunno, Toyota in Nagoya threw himself in front of a train because the company required too many hours of him.
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Feb 9, 2022 03:22
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zmcnulty posted:Realistically the vast majority of jobs that (white) foreigners do and the kinds of companies we work for means we can generally avoid all of the poor work/life balance that a lot of Japanese people endure, if desired. Even the shittiest English teacher dispatch companies may treat their gaijins like dirt and pay them like 3 million yen a year, yet they're also not requiring them to stay in the office until 9PM every night. Sure there are some exceptions--starting your own business, law, some roles in finance, IT crunch--but those jobs often have poor work/life balance outside of Japan too. It's mostly the "black" SMOs in Japan that have the semi-mandatory ridiculous work hours you hear about, and those usually aren't the kinds of companies that would hire any Westerners at all. What's an SMO in this context?
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Feb 9, 2022 03:41
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Small medium organisations I think
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Feb 9, 2022 03:43
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Did you Japan? Hai sempai 166 38.60% No 42 9.77% Unknown 26 6.05% Goku 196 45.58% Total: 430 votes Results are in, Goku is the winner for January 2021, thanks for your contributions everybody!
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Feb 9, 2022 03:47
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Charles 2 of Spain posted:Small medium organisations I think Right, this. Nikkei says 99.7% of the companies in Japan are SMOs, and they employ 68.8% of the working population. There's more data in this article which says around 60% of companies, big or small/medium, don't hire any gaijin at all, which doesn't really jive with my previous post. But it also says 60% of the gaijins getting hired are either technical trainees or dependent visas, most are working in construction/manufacturing/something industrial, and 77% are making less than 30man per month. Probably not many people leaving the Western world to work at construction sites or factories just to scrape by in Japan, so the vast majority are from elsewhere in Asia. tl;dr if you're reading this post on these dead gay forums you are probably skilled enough to not have to worry about having a bad work/life balance in Japan.
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Feb 9, 2022 04:54
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Yeah, well There's nothing I could do that a local couldn't do better, so no way in hell would I be able to emigrate.
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Feb 9, 2022 05:54
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Shibawanko posted:it sucks for japanese people who are expected to put up with it, white westerners aren't expected to do the same (i dunno what it's like for asian westerners, or the occasional black or middle eastern guy i see working in construction, probably different), even if your job title is the same as a japanese coworker you aren't expected to put up with the same things Yeah it’s not so bad for black westerners either. Not really sure why you and zmcnulty would assume things would be any different for non-whites from the same countries. DiscoJ fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Feb 9, 2022 |
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Feb 9, 2022 11:55
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DiscoJ posted:Yeah it’s not so bad for black westerners either. Not really sure why you and zmcnulty would assume things would be any different for non-whites from the same countries. because zmcnulty talking about the vast majority of foreign workers in Japan: Chinese and southeast asians
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Feb 9, 2022 13:07
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DiscoJ posted:Yeah it’s not so bad for black westerners either. Not really sure why you and zmcnulty would assume things would be any different for non-whites from the same countries. yeah sorry i just meant that there's a lot of foreign workers in japan that work blue collar jobs and most of these seem to be either chinese or other asian countries, or middle eastern, or black african, i was just stating i don't know what their situation is like as a caveat to the rest of my post
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Feb 9, 2022 14:16
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Thanks for all the replies! I've been thinking about this a lot ever since I got an offer from a japanese company. They said that a portion of the salary was a fixed overtime bonus, and that overtime was "very low" at an average at 20 hours a month. Seemed crazy to me that they'd brag about that. I also thought it was super shady that like, 40% of the salary was in this so called "fixed overtime bonus", which from a cursory look in google is not subject to labor laws, so they can reduce it for any reason should I not work 20h of overtime every month. Despite all that it lit up this little "what if..." light in my brain that hasn't gone off. This was almost a year ago, now. I lead a very comfortable, but very boring, life, but I'm just afraid that working 300h/week in Japan might be the wrong way to shake things up. Even if that means that I finally get a use of all the hours I put into studying japanese. 
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Feb 9, 2022 14:37
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Name and shame lol Jeez
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Feb 9, 2022 14:41
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Phone posted:Name and shame lol Fixed overtime is very common. It's called みなし残業.
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Feb 9, 2022 14:56
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Gabriel Grub posted:Fixed overtime is very common. It's called みなし残業. Are they a KK? I can’t find them
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Feb 9, 2022 15:25
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marumaru posted:Thanks for all the replies! I've been thinking about this a lot ever since I got an offer from a japanese company. They said that a portion of the salary was a fixed overtime bonus, and that overtime was "very low" at an average at 20 hours a month. Seemed crazy to me that they'd brag about that. I also thought it was super shady that like, 40% of the salary was in this so called "fixed overtime bonus", which from a cursory look in google is not subject to labor laws, so they can reduce it for any reason should I not work 20h of overtime every month. If it is the みなし残業 (minashi zangyou, 'expected overtime') Gabriel mentioned, you may not need to see it in that way. The system basically means that you will only get paid additional extra overtime if you go above 20 hours in a month. It doesn't mean you must do 20 hours overtime to get your base salary. For my company, the 'expected overtime' is set at 40 hours IIRC, and I work 'undertime' more frequently than I work 'overtime' these days. I still get my full salary, same everyone else doing the standard 7.5 hours (+lunch break) each day. So yes, actually the threshold being set at 20 hours (instead of 40 like at my company) can be considered 'very low'. It means you'd get paid extra for your overtime a lot sooner. That said, if they were literally talking about actual overtime, as opposed to the 'expected overtime', then yeah you should probably stay away from such an environment.
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Feb 9, 2022 16:10
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Gabriel Grub and zmcnulty may know more accurate specifics, but my impression has been that very few positions are overtime exempt in japan and the way businesses get around it is they bake overtime in. As others have already said, you get paid for that baked-in overtime whether you work it or not, so the smart thing to do is avoid working any overtime 
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Feb 10, 2022 02:11
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DiscoJ posted:Yeah it’s not so bad for black westerners either. Not really sure why you and zmcnulty would assume things would be any different for non-whites from the same countries. I hope it's the same! I phrased my posts like that specifically because I don't want to make assumptions about the situations of non-whites from the same countries. I'm white, been working in salaryman corporate Japan for like 14 years, and many of my friends are also white in similar jobs so I can speak with some degree of confidence about that specific group. In theory, sure, Japanese people wouldn't have expectations of an Asian/Black/Hispanic person from the US any different from their expectations of me. But I'm not really in a position to address that with much authority, is all. marumaru posted:Thanks for all the replies! I've been thinking about this a lot ever since I got an offer from a japanese company. They said that a portion of the salary was a fixed overtime bonus, and that overtime was "very low" at an average at 20 hours a month. Seemed crazy to me that they'd brag about that. I also thought it was super shady that like, 40% of the salary was in this so called "fixed overtime bonus", which from a cursory look in google is not subject to labor laws, so they can reduce it for any reason should I not work 20h of overtime every month. This is exactly what my company has. As other posters said, it's pretty standard for seishain. Basically a certain amount of overtime is baked into your salary. We do have to submit timecards but that's not to ensure we meet some minimum threshold. Instead, it's to ensure we aren't working too much overtime. My company has gotten some warnings from the MHLW before and they take it quite seriously. Like literally forcing people to go leave at 5:30PM towards the end of the month because they're too close to hitting the overtime cap. As you get more seniority that cap gets higher, but your comp will go up too. Also 20 hours of overtime a month is like an hour a day? So you stay until 6:30 rather than 5:30, big deal. Unless you have kids you have to pick up from nursery school or something, you can still make happy hour.
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Feb 10, 2022 02:33
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My company is unionized (auto industry) and we have full flex and zero overtime - it’s supposed to be only with alignment of the director of the department. Of course, this was an issue in the past (I believe we heard from the government), but it’s the one time I actually believe that HR wants to see that improve, and I know the union stance is very “hire more people, you jerks.” My wife’s company is that “first 20 is covered” style, and I know plenty of others who have that style. I’m pretty glad I avoided that through sheer luck and circumstances.
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Feb 10, 2022 14:26
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You can also just not do the overtime and if eventually they get pissed off and fire you or something, who cares, just go back to whatever you were doing before, it's just a job. Like if some manager comes up and says "you didn't stay an extra hour yesterday (doing nothing)" then just blankly look at them and say "oh yeah I didn't need to" then just walk away.
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Feb 16, 2022 07:33
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ok
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Feb 16, 2022 11:45
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back in europe, my wife and i are seriously discussing going back to live in japan this year though because the housing market's just a lot more affordable and jobs in our fields are more readily available whenever i come back to europe after having been there for a while it's like a cold bath when you step off the plane, people blocking your way on the escalators, much less friendly staff, buying a bottle of water is suddenly 3 euros instead of 100 yen and you have to queue up instead of going to a vending machine, and so on
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Feb 16, 2022 11:47
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Shibawanko posted:back in europe, my wife and i are seriously discussing going back to live in japan this year though because the housing market's just a lot more affordable and jobs in our fields are more readily available Cheese tho
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Feb 16, 2022 13:54
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Non-job-chat I guess, but seems like barring any new weird strains causing furthering of isolationist entry policies, Japan's considering re-opening to non-tourist foreign entry in.. March, I read somewhere? .. so that probably bodes well for me booking a flight for next May (2023) and maybe being somewhat confident I won't have to mash the cancel button. It's a fools errand to try to anticipate this but I guess this is the closest we've been to considering reopening so.. I'll stay optimistic? some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 14:32
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Don't expect tourism yet, sorry
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Feb 16, 2022 15:00
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Yeah I see I said next May without realizing that next may is technically still 2022. I meant 2023 for sure.
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Feb 16, 2022 15:14
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If nothing else goes wrong I wouldn't be too surprised if tourism is back on the menu in 2023. They may still be limiting how many can come at once if that's possible, not sure how that would work with countries that don't require a visa in advance.
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Feb 16, 2022 15:30
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Martytoof posted:Yeah I see I said next May without realizing that next may is technically still 2022. I meant 2023 for sure. Instead of booking then cancelling then booking then cancelling and praying they'll open the borders sometime between now and <departure date>, how about just waiting for them to actually announce they're open again and organising your trip then? Japan's not an endangered species that you have to see now now now before it disappears, dude.
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Feb 16, 2022 19:10
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Once Japan opens up the floodgates will open and it would be hard to get a good place booked at a decent price.
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Feb 16, 2022 19:28
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Because I like having something to look forward to. It literally costs me nothing to be optimistic.
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Feb 16, 2022 19:29
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Zettace posted:Once Japan opens up the floodgates will open and it would be hard to get a good place booked at a decent price. I'm so loving jealous of the people living in Japan who can visit empty Kyoto.
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Feb 16, 2022 20:08
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It's cold as balls tho
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Feb 16, 2022 23:14
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Charles 2 of Spain posted:It's cold as balls tho That's just a reason to go to an onsen.
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Feb 16, 2022 23:22
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Zettace posted:Once Japan opens up the floodgates will open and it would be hard to get a good place booked at a decent price. This is the main reason why I ain't made any plans whatsoever.
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Feb 17, 2022 03:27
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The current discussion is opening for new foreign residents, and possibly relaxing quarantine rules on return for current residents (including no quarantine for certain areas, details still TBD). So I wouldn’t be shocked if by fall we’re looking at tourism returning. Whether it’s a true good idea or not is a bit separate, but that’s where my brain is at.
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Feb 17, 2022 05:58
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better tourists than students tbh
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Feb 17, 2022 06:09
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What do y’all have against students??
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Feb 17, 2022 07:19
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Tourists at least have money.
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Feb 17, 2022 10:07
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For purely selfish reasons I will gladly accept all students being able to get in before a single tourist.
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Feb 17, 2022 10:41
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In my experience 90% of students are doing the tourist thing anyway.
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Feb 17, 2022 13:22
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Martytoof posted:I was just being nice. I'd rather be priority over students too. Reiterating my stance
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Feb 17, 2022 18:43
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